BOOKS
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French literary criticism with
Sur Racine
(1963) and
Essais Critiques
(1964); these were bilterly denounced by Raymond Picard in
Nouvelle
Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture?
and defended by their author in
Critique et Verite
(\966). Barthes' mode of literary exegesis, based on a
radical anachronism and subjectivism, has by now been widely ac–
cepted in France, though in the English-speaking countries critics are
just taking the first steps towards accepting and applying its premises.
His recent works show him making yet another leap of self–
transcendence, claiming an absolute interpretive freedom in the name
of a "pleasure of the text" not to be subdued by any orthodoxy; this
would again provide grounds for scandal were it not that Barthes
himself has over the past twenty years so widened the scope of literary
studies that few French critics would still presume
to
set any limits to
discourse about writing.
Barthes' academic career has not been smooth or regular, though
its vagaries have contributed to his extraordinary diversity of intellec–
tual interes t and achievement. Normally he would no doubt have made
a brilliant progress through the successive levels of the French educa–
tional hi erarchy, but in 1934, at the age of nineteen , he suffered a
tubercular les ion. For the next thirteen years he was in and out of
sanitariums. As an invalid he could not be directly involved in the
supreme moral tes t of the Occupation. After the war he taught in
Rumania and Egypt, was a cultural bureaucrat and a research associate
in sociology; not until 1960 did he settle into a prestigious appoint–
ment at the
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
in Paris, where he has
since remained, nominally as a sociologist. His contributions in
popular culture, semiology, and structuralism can scarcely be encom–
passed in a brief review so I will comment only on what he has said
about literary theory in three recent works: the two under review and
Sade, Fourier, Loyola
( 1971 ). These mark a definite new phase in his
work, a ques t for wha t is irreducibly personal in his literary responses
and a corresponding devaluation of the earli er influences of Marxism
and Saussurean linguistics . They assert a hedonism of language that
suppli es both a criti cal method and a moral ground for Barthes '
particular critical vocation.
It
is in the preface
to
Sade, Fourier, Loyo la
that Barthes first argues
his belief that the " text" is not an intell ectual object but an object of
pleasure. Not all literary works, one must explain, are defined as texts:
only those that lend themselves to the protean transformations and
decodings that Barthes and his followers delight in. Traditional
literary criti cs, if they should ever mention Sade, Fourier, and Loyo la
in one brea th , would assume that the aristocratic immorali st, the
